Proof of my nerd cred: among my occasional pastimes is picking an image from the “Images for Cleanup” category at Wikimedia Commons and, you guessed it, cleaning it up. (If you’re curious, here’s an example of my handiwork.)»
Nerdiness sometimes brings unexpected little rewards: last night I came across an image at the Commons that only needed to be categorized. The photo that caught my eye showed something like an enormous game of Jenga… an enormous game of Jenga, made of people. As the kids on the internet say, OMFG.
It turned out that I had found a photo of the Castellers de Vilafranca. Castells, I learned, are human towers, the building of which is a traditional Catalan sporting activity. I also learned that it is fucking insane — and I mean that admiringly.
Check this out: here are the Castellers de Vilafranca on August 31, 2009, attempting history’s first tres de nou amb folre i agulla — roughly translated, a nine-level tower with two base levels, three people each on the upper levels, and an agulla (“needle”) of one person per level inside the main tower. If you can’t understand the commentator’s Catalonian-accented Spanish, don’t worry; the changes in his tone of voice pretty much say it all.
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Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi, the first African-American U.S. Senator
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out 
…nwood…
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